Mars Goes to YouTube to Market 3 Musketeers to Gen Z

Dive Brief:

In an effort to introduce the 3 Musketeers brand to Gen Z, Mars is running a digital-only campaign featuring YouTube clips starring three unknown teens it hopes to turn into social media influencers, according to Digiday.

Tribal Worldwide is the agency behind the effort, and in a statement said, "3 Musketeers decided to do something that has never been done before: Create reach and relevance of their own, by building a trio of influencers, from scratch."

So far the YouTube channel has 11,600 subscribers with around 40,000 video views, but the first two videos also have a 50/50 thumbs up or down mix and some comments have reflected a negative reaction to the brand-driven effort. The 3 Musketeers Facebook Page, meanwhile, has over 1.1 million likes and the videos have received hundreds of thousands of views already.

Dive Insight:

Marketers are still working out the kinks in marketing to millennials, much less Gen Z, but Mars is taking what might be a risky approach to reaching that demographic with its 3 Musketeers campaign. The heart of influencer marketing is its authenticity – one attribute that has been proven to work with millennials. Mars has turned that concept on its head by creating a very brand-driven, contrived approach to building an influencer from zero.

About the campaign, Allison Miazga Bedrick, the senior brand director at Mars, told Digiday, “We’re the first brand to create our own influencers that in itself takes a lot learning, and we’ll see how we can leverage the platforms to augment that strategy.”

Given the relative unknowns around what might work in marketing to Gen Z, Mars' bet on reaching out through influencer marketing could end up a great case study, especially if it shows whether the millennials' younger cohorts value authenticity as much as that group does.